Zombies and Rich Drunk Italians

Last night I dreamed of zombies, again. I was in Ireland this time. A high school class from some European place were there with me. We were in the Irish country side. We were looking at some type of windmill during the day. At night we were all holed up in a little shack. This is when the zombies came out. They were surounding the shack. In the shack with us were these three rich Italians, two men and a woman, along with their servants. For some reason the servants were much more at risk of getting attacked and infected by the zombies than other people, perhaps because they had to go outside so much. However, they had been carefully trained so that if they were bitten they would go on serving, until it became obvious that they were about to turn into a zombie, and then they would let themselves out quietly before they started attacking people.

There was a bar in the shack, and the three Italians spent all their time at the bar. The one man and the woman were drinking the two alchohols that go into martinis separately, like the man was drinking one and the woman was drinking the other. The other man was drinking something called "aquavit". I don't know if that is something that exists in reality. They were each drinking these liquors because they would compliment and enhance their separate personalities. You could tell by looking at them that they each had a separate over-riding characteristic which they exemplified. It was important for these three rich Italians to get drunk, because when you’re drunk you can run away from and fight the zombies much more easily; like you won’t notice the pain, and you’ll never be able to rationalize to yourself that the running and fighting is hopeless; you’ll just keep running and fighting until you physically can’t do it anymore, and probably have an almost fun time doing it too.

I woke up before anything really scary happened, though I was still a little tweaked out.

I have no idea what the Italians or the Europeans are all about. I think that the significance of the Italians was less their nationality and more their economic class, i.e. rich. They were looked down on by me during the dream. I thought of them as escapist and pretentious, like they were in an Ivory Tower, ignoring the reality of the situation. However, by the end of the dream I well understood why they felt the need to get drunk; it wasn’t a perfect situation in everyday life, but when the zombies start to come after you, you’ll thank your lucky stars that you’re numb and slightly irrational.

I’ve had a lot of dreams about zombies, and zombies usually seem to represent the part of me that feels completely out of control, or mindless. They also have an element of conformity about them, of having no separate will, just an instinct. I believe that in this dream it was not so much about conformity, or feeling attacked by a mindless society. No, I believe that this time they represented the madness in myself that I always keep suppressed. I am often afraid that the madness will take over (in reality, not in dreams) and I concoct various methods of making sure I keep myself under control. For example, over the past year I have become quite dependant on over-the-counter sleeping pills. I only take one or two a night, but even that small amount goes a long way towards making me feel like a normal, functioning human being. I’m not saying that I do feel like a normal, functioning human being while I’m on them, I just feel more like a normal, functioning human being. But I also often analogize my addiction to sleeping pills to that of an alcoholic, and indeed, the feeling I have while on them is vaguely reminiscent of being a little bit tipsy. Obviously, this is the situation that this dream was commenting on. But it didn’t seem negative. It seemed understandable, and perhaps the best solution for a fucked-up world.

And even though I looked down on them a little bit, I would still rather be a rich Italian than myself.